So many texts, even entire books, often deal with topics like “Does XY exist?” or “XY is not real because…”.

There are even people who dedicate their entire lives to such questions.

Does God exist?

Does the soul exist?

Does the table exist?

Does the self exist?

Do thoughts exist?

So many people have pondered similar questions. But have we even described what “exist” or “real” actually means? What if the complexity lies not in the answer but in the question itself? Slavoj Žižek put it aptly: “The purpose of philosophy is to ask the right questions.”

Intuitively, we equate “real” with something tangible and material.

But we need to be careful even at this point: there are abstract conceptual ideas. Physical reality is cohesive and continuous, and it is only through the human capacity for abstraction that we can distinguish individual things from the environment.

Imagine it like a sand mold (abstract construct) that you place in the sand, and then the sand within that mold appears to be separated from the surrounding sand.

Even in the Bible (Genesis 2:20), it says: “And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field…”

This means that humans pick out individual forms from reality and view them as separate using a construct (names). God has given us the entire continuous spectrum, but humans break it down into individual parts.

Example:

A table. Does a table exist? Yes and no. Yes, because you can stand on the table, touch it, and stub your toe on it. No, because the table only exists as a concept, and you’re not standing on a table, but on a wooden board with four legs. How short can the legs be before it becomes a board and not a table? Let’s conduct the following thought experiment (it can also be put into practice): We stand on a table and then step off. Now we saw off a small piece from the legs. Then we step back up and say, “The table beneath me exists.” We repeat this process until it feels wrong to say, “The table beneath me exists.” Where is the boundary?

We quickly see that the existence of the table depends on our concept of “table.” So, we’ve placed the sand mold on the board with four legs, while everything else around it is “non-table.” If the 5 cm layer of air directly above the table board were also solid, that air would also count as a table.

The same applies, of course, to the tabletop and table legs themselves. They too are made up of different pieces of wood glued or grown together. And even the wood itself doesn’t exist as such but as cellulose, and so on.

Everything physical and tangible quickly becomes invisible and intangible when we zoom in. In the end, everything consists of interacting fields of information, vibrations, and the like. The further we zoom in, the harder it becomes to use the term “real.” The interaction with our senses as a criterion for reality blurs. We wouldn’t call a number between 1 and 10 that we come up with “real.” But that number is just as much “only” information as the matter that everything around us, our body, our brain, and the tools we use to come up with a number consists of.

So, when we contemplate whether something exists, it’s like trying to assign various lizard species to different mobile charging cables. No wonder whole books have to be written about it. Because the concept of “reality,” like all other concepts, arose as a means to interpret phenomena that we intuitively consider “real.” The concept, therefore, originated from practical nature, and now, to postulate this concept as given and impose it on the world out there, requires a lot of mental acrobatics.

The question is not “Does God exist?” but rather “What do you mean by ‘exist’ when you say that God does/doesn’t exist?” And for the sake of completeness, “What do you mean by God?”

Do thoughts exist? We can’t touch them, but now we know: What does that have to do with the question?

The concept is indeed very useful but has no deeper truth value beyond that.